Coffee, Whisky, and the Capacity to Feel

Photo by the author, taken in Beijing

Today I want to talk about something I'll call sensitivity, the capacity to feel and notice. I don't want to do it in a bookish, pedantic way, so let's talk about coffee and good liquor instead.

Drinks are a wonderful way in. They give us hard evidence that the world of the senses is far richer than we usually admit, and they make us feel the gap between the world of words and the world of sensation. And once you feel that gap, the world starts to look marvelous, and life feels good to be living.

"The light roast carries a distinctive note of lemon, flowers, and honeyed sweetness, with a soft fruit acidity and a hint of citrus. The mouthfeel is fresh and bright, the kind of thing that lifts your whole day."

"Citrus and sea air on the nose. The first sip floods your mouth with heavy smoke and a warm, malty body, and the finish leaves a faint pepper heat at the back of the tongue. On a rainy late-autumn day, one glass and you're standing on Scotland's cold, gray coast."

Yes, both of those passages are describing drinks.

The first one is coffee, a Yirgacheffe.

The second is whisky, Talisker 10.

The first time I read words like these, I was a little baffled.

It wasn't that I'd never had coffee, or never had a drink. But I'd somehow never gotten anything this subtle, this elegant, out of the experience.

For a while I believed there was such a thing as "the taste of coffee."

Think of twisting open a bottle of cold brew on a frantic morning, or ordering a latte at the wooden bar in a Starbucks on a slow afternoon, that first sip with its roasted-bean aroma and gentle bitterness.

Sure, sugar and milk shift things around a bit, but the smell and flavor of coffee just was "the coffee taste," an aroma and an elegance that belonged to coffee alone, not "lemon, flowers, fruit acidity."

I also believed for a while that there was such a thing as "the taste of alcohol."

The burn of baijiu going down, the malt and refreshing rush of beer, the sweet-and-sour grace of wine, and the whole reek of liquor coming off a drunk adult.

Of course baijiu, red wine, beer, and rum all taste different. We know a bottle of Maotai costs many, many times more than a bottle of Jiang Xiaobai, and within a single category the finer differences obviously exist. But I genuinely had no idea what "citrus and sea air" was supposed to look like.

What first pulled me toward specialty coffee and single malt whisky was simple curiosity about this kind of language, this way of describing things.

I wanted to know why a cup of coffee could taste of the tartness and clean sweetness of red berries, and why a spirit over forty percent alcohol could give off the smell of citrus and the sea.

I felt like a kid with his nose pressed to a toy shop window, staring at the dazzling shelves inside, imagining the dreamlike happiness those delicate little things might bring, until for a moment I couldn't tell whether what was in the window was a dream or real life.

Luckily, both specialty coffee and whisky sat comfortably within what I could afford.

So what was I waiting for. Place the order, wait for it to arrive, wash up and dress for the occasion, and find out whether it really was as magical as they said.

Maybe it was just the power of suggestion. But when I solemnly set the drink in front of me, when I really leaned in to smell what rose off it and paid honest attention to the opening, middle, and finish on my tongue, I did get the wonderful experience the label and the little blurb on the packaging had promised me.

I don't know what counts as "fresh and bright," but the Yirgacheffe really did have an unmistakable "sweet aroma, fruity flavor."

I couldn't tell you what "the Scottish coast" tastes like, but the Talisker 10 really did have its signature "smoke, pepper heat."

Which made me wonder. How were these flavors first picked out and named? Behind all these adjectives, is there some shared, universal standard at work?

Coffee and good liquor hold a riot of flavor and an endless charm. You can't sum them up in a line or two.

Image [wide] SCA - The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel

Next time you're in a café, look around. Near the bar you'll often spot a circular diagram, packed tight with descriptive words about aroma and taste. It's called a flavor wheel.

Its full name is the Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel. First published in 1995, it's the most representative reference the coffee world has, and for more than twenty years it served as the industry standard.

In 2016 the SCA (Specialty Coffee Association) and WCR (World Coffee Research) collaborated on an update. It was the largest and most broadly collaborative study of coffee flavor ever undertaken, and drawing on the World Coffee Research Sensory Lexicon, it gave professionals a new vocabulary to work with.

The word "flavor" is defined as the combination of taste and smell, and the wheel covers a whole range of qualities and terms, from the basic tastes (the things your tongue detects) all the way out to pure aroma (the things you can only smell).

From that point on, the delicate, complicated sensory experience of drinking coffee could be described in ordinary language with much greater precision.

The flavor wheel handed us a universal grading standard and a system of labels. With it, anyone can judge a coffee as good or bad in a way that's relatively fair and objective.

Image [wide]

Following coffee's lead, other drink industries rolled out their own flavor wheels too. So, as you'd expect, we now have a whisky flavor wheel, a tea flavor wheel, and so on.

What you'll notice is the striking agreement between these different wheels. Coffee's flavor compounds come from how the bean is grown, roasted, ground, and brewed; whisky's come from distillation and aging. But the aldehydes and acids that naturally arise during these processes are the same molecules that carry the scents of fruit, cocoa, and flowers, and they're exactly what give each drink its character.

Sometimes I find myself wondering: coffee with the caffeine taken out, and whisky with the alcohol taken out, would they turn out to be the very same thing?

If I were a professional cupper and you handed me a cup of coffee, I could tell you a great deal by reading it against the wheel.

Is its aroma herbal, fruity, floral, or is it chocolate, nutty, caramel, or is it spiced, char-grilled?

How is it sweet, sour, astringent, bitter?

A clean, clear sweetness, or the sweet-and-sour of unripe fruit?

Bitter to the point of being hard to swallow, or just the right touch of bitterness?

And so on.

But if you simply asked me what coffee tastes like, I'd suddenly have no answer.

I'd just wave a hand, try to cover the awkward look on my face, and say:

I don't know, coffee is a complicated thing.

I can tell you how a dark roast differs in flavor from a light one. I can tell you how a Yirgacheffe differs from a Golden Mandheling.

But if you want me to name one general, universal taste of coffee, I'm sorry, I can't.

It isn't only coffee and whisky. The same thing shows up in other fields.

Tell an artist: mix me a red.

He or she will freeze.

Because they realize their language can't simply pin down this thing called "red."

Take just the single color sample of "China red." We have:

peony pink-red, fragrant-leaf red, brilliant red, jade red, camellia red,

full-river red, mouse-nose red, mimosa red, spring-plum red, amaranth red,

plum red, goose-comb red, maple-leaf red, gladiolus red, jujube red,

deep crimson, marvel-of-Peru red, camellia red, begonia red, litmus red...

All of these reds can of course be called "red."

But to someone with a fine sensitivity, every one of these samples is its own shade, and each stirs a different feeling.

On the website China Colors, each of them corresponds to a different set of RGB values.

You might be curious: if we drop ordinary language and switch to something more precise and quantified, like an RGB code, can we express these differences more finely?

For coffee and whisky, everything we call smell, aroma, and taste can be traced down to the chemistry of molecules in the microscopic world. So if we fully mapped out the correspondence between every taste and every chemical compound, could we then build a perfect, complete digital simulation of a drink?

No.

To show why, let me give you one more example.

In 1907, Kikunae Ikeda, a researcher at the Tokyo Imperial University in Japan, found brown crystals left behind after a broth of kombu (kelp) had been boiled down. They were monosodium glutamate.

These crystals had a taste that was hard to describe but very good, and traces of it can be found in many foods.

Before long, Ikeda worked out how to mass-produce monosodium glutamate industrially, and from then on the crystals showed up in kitchens everywhere. Its commercial name is MSG.

And that taste, the glutamate taste, is what we commonly call umami.

So can we say that umami simply is monosodium glutamate?

Of course not. Set a glass of glutamate solution (MSG dissolved in water) in front of you and it's bound to give off a kind of "industrial umami," off-putting, thin on detail, unnatural, and not good to drink.

The flavors of coffee and whisky work the same way.

Set against the rich, detailed, haunting sensory experience the world gives us, an over-simplified adjective is pale and powerless.

We have to hone our own taste and stretch our own language so we can catch the subtle, delicate distinctions our senses register.

I like to call this taste "sensitivity," or "acumen." It's what underlies human aesthetics and empathy.

Bad words, sweeping generalizations, and the disciplining force of society all eat away at our sensitivity.

Cultivate your sensitivity. Protect your sensitivity. And the colors and the aroma of coffee will come flooding back to fill your world.

I remember once reading a Chinese translation of one of Calvino's books, where I ran into a small, delicate misunderstanding.

It was a passage describing a banquet. In the fruit bowl sat some fruit, called shìduōpílí.

Shìduōpílí, what a marvelous name. My eyes only paused on the unfamiliar word for a second, but I knew it carried a slightly tart taste, because the sound and the look of it made me think of sourness. I figured it was some berry with a tropical, exotic air, crisp, full of juice, with a green, sweet-and-sour bite.

I closed the book, suddenly desperate to know what shìduōpílí actually was in real life. Maybe I could even order some online and taste it. I opened a search engine, typed in shìduōpílí, and what came up was this:

Shìduōpílí means strawberry. The Cantonese rendering shìduōpílí is a transliteration of its English name, Strawberry.

Ah, Strawberry? So it was nothing more than an unfamiliar transliteration.

And that tart, novel, exotic berry? I had practically tasted its sourness already, and in an instant it became the plain, slightly dull, rather boring "strawberry."

(No offense meant, I'm a strawberry lover too, but dear reader, you have to understand that next to the charm of shìduōpílí, the strawberry can't help but pale.)

But what does it matter?

To this day, in my memory and my imagination, the fruit sitting in Calvino's bowl is still the sweet-and-sour shìduōpílí.

I'm Lunar Mare. Thank you for reading.

Feel free to reach me however you like. My email is lunar_mare_official@outlook.com. Write to me anytime, I reply to every message. :)

References:

Chen Jiaying, Philosophy, Science, Common Sense
China Colors
SSPAI - Coffee Primer, Chapter 6: An Introduction to Coffee Tasting
SCA - The Coffee Taster's Flavor Wheel
Buzaichang - Bonus, On: Stacks